Richard Aitson (December 26, 1953- June 24, 2022) is a
Kiowa
Kiowa () people are a Native American tribe and an indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries,Pritzker 326 and eve ...
-
Kiowa Apache
The Plains Apache are a small Southern Athabaskan group who live on the Southern Plains of North America, in close association with the linguistically unrelated Kiowa Tribe. Today, they are centered in Southwestern Oklahoma and Northern Texas and ...
bead artist, curator, and poet from
Oklahoma
Oklahoma (; Choctaw language, Choctaw: ; chr, ᎣᎧᎳᎰᎹ, ''Okalahoma'' ) is a U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States, bordered by Texas on the south and west, Kansas on the nor ...
.
Background
Richard Aitson was born on December 26, 1953, in
Anadarko, Oklahoma
Anadarko is a city in Caddo County, Oklahoma, United States. The city is fifty miles southwest of Oklahoma City. The population was 5,745 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat of Caddo County.
History
Anadarko got its name when its post off ...
.
[Velie, 297]["Richard Aitson, 1953-"]
''Native American Authors.'' (retrieved 10 Jan 2010) His mother was the Kiowa traditionalist Alecia Keahbone Gonzales (1926–2011), who taught the
Kiowa language
Kiowa or Cáuijògà/Cáuijò:gyà ("language of the Cáuigù (Kiowa)") is a Tanoan language spoken by the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma in primarily Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche counties. The Kiowa tribal center is located in Carnegie. Like most Nor ...
at the
University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (USAO) is a public liberal arts college in Chickasha, Oklahoma. It is the only public college in Oklahoma with a strictly liberal arts–focused curriculum and is a member of the Council of Public ...
. Aitson's Kiowa name means "Buffalo Rider." His family has had many artistic accomplishments and he comes five generations of respected beadworkers.
["Richard Aitson."]
''Legends Santa Fe.'' 2010 (retrieved 10 Jan 2010) Aitson attended the
Kimball Union Academy
Kimball Union Academy is a private boarding school located in New Hampshire. Founded in 1813, it is the 22nd oldest boarding school in the United States. The academy's mission is to "create a deep sense of belonging for every member of our commu ...
in
Meriden, New Hampshire
Meriden is an unincorporated community in the eastern part of the town of Plainfield in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, United States. Meriden is home to Kimball Union Academy, a private boarding school. New Hampshire Route 120 passes through t ...
;
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...
in
Oberlin, Ohio
Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States, 31 miles southwest of Cleveland. Oberlin is the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students.
The town is the birthplace of the ...
; and the
Institute of American Indian Arts
The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The college focuses on Native American art. It operates the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), which is housed in the historic S ...
in
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe ( ; , Spanish for 'Holy Faith'; tew, Oghá P'o'oge, Tewa for 'white shell water place'; tiw, Hulp'ó'ona, label=Tiwa language, Northern Tiwa; nv, Yootó, Navajo for 'bead + water place') is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. ...
.
[Harjo and Little Thunder, 104]
In 1976, Aitson produced documentaries for the
Bicentennial __NOTOC__
A bicentennial or bicentenary is the two-hundredth anniversary of a part, or the celebrations thereof. It may refer to:
Europe
*French Revolution bicentennial, commemorating the 200th anniversary of 14 July 1789 uprising, celebrated ...
Commission about Native American events. He worked at the Squash Blossom Gallery in
Aspen, Colorado
Aspen is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Pitkin County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 7,004 at the 2020 United States Census. Aspen is in a remote area of the Rocky Mounta ...
, in 1979, which is where he first curated art shows. He has since curated many group shows, including "Winter Camp 2000" at the
National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, with more than 28,000 Western and American Indian art works and artifacts. The facility also has the world's most extensive collection of Ame ...
in
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, a ...
. He taught Native American literature at Anadarko High School and also taught at
Bacone College
Bacone College, formerly Bacone Indian University, is a private tribal college in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Founded in 1880 as the Indian University by missionary Almon C. Bacone, it was originally affiliated with the mission arm of what is now Ameri ...
as an Adjunct Professor of Art.
Beadwork
Aitson jumped into
beadwork
Beadwork is the art or craft of attaching beads to one another by stringing them onto a thread or thin wire with a sewing or beading needle or sewing them to cloth. Beads are produced in a diverse range of materials, shapes, and sizes, and vary b ...
ing out of necessity. He was invited to join the prestigious Kiowa Gourd Clan and had to learn beading to create his
gourd dance
The Gourd Dance is a social dance.
Origin legends
Many Native Americans dispute the origin of the legend of the Gourd Dance. A Kiowa story recounts the tale of a young man who had been separated from the rest of the tribe. Hungry and dehydrated ...
regalia.
[ Aitson describes his art as "contemporary-traditional"][ and he creates beaded dance regalia for the Native American community as well as bead art for fine art collectors and museums.
He is known in particular for his fully beaded, functional ]cradleboard
Cradleboards (, se, gietkka, sms, ǩiõtkâm, smn, kietkâm, sje, gietkam) are traditional protective baby-carriers used by many indigenous cultures in North America and throughout northern Scandinavia amongst the Sámi. There are a variety ...
s, but he also makes miniature cradleboards with extremely minute beads. "I am touched by the art of the World War years and the Reservation Era because in my opinion, that is when the finest Kiowa beadwork was produced," he writes. "Quality beads and supplies were extremely scarce, yet remarkable and ingenious beadwork that bridged the ancient and the future was quietly created."
Writing
Aitson writes poems inspired by traditional Kiowa oral history. His work, as Alan Velie writes, "combines the dream vision with animism to produce striking powerful imagery. He is inspired by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda (; ), was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Nerud ...
.[
]
Exhibits and honors
In 1992, Aitson had a solo exhibition at the US Department of Interior's Southern Plains Indian Museum
Southern Plains Indian Museum is a Native American museum located in Anadarko, Oklahoma. It was opened in 1948 under a cooperative governing effort by the United States Department of the Interior and the Oklahoma state government. The museum feat ...
in Anadarko.[ His work has earned numerous awards, including the Red Earth Festival's Grand Award in 1997 and the ]Southwest Museum
The Southwest Museum of the American Indian is a museum, library, and archive located in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, above the north-western bank of the Arroyo Seco (Los Angeles County) canyon and stream. The muse ...
's Jackie Autry Purchase Prize in 2005."On the Wind."
''Native Peoples.'' January/February 2005 (retrieved 10 Jan 2010) Many examples of his work are part of the permanent collection at the Sequoyah National Research Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
See also
*List of Native American artists
This is a list of visual artists who are Native Americans in the United States. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 defines "Native American" as being enrolled in either federally recognized tribes or state recognized tribes or "an individual ...
*Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas
Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes ...
Notes
References
*Goins, Charles Robert and Danney Goble
''Historical Atlas of Oklahoma.''
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. .
*Harjo, Barbara and Julie Pearson Little Thunder
''Artistic Tastes: Favorite Recipes of Native American Artists.''
Santa Fe: Kiva Publishing, 1998. .
*Johnson, Nancy and Norman F. Sheridan. ''Winter Camp 2000''. Oklahoma City: National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 1999. .
*Velie, Alan R
''American Indian Literature: An Anthology.''
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. .
External links
Oral History Interview with Richard Aitson
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aitson, Richard
Apache people
Kiowa people
Native American bead artists
Native American painters
Native American writers
1953 births
Living people
Artists from Oklahoma
People from Anadarko, Oklahoma
Institute of American Indian Arts alumni
Bacone College faculty
Oberlin College alumni